Myron Tribus

In 1969, Tribus accepted a political appointee post in the Richard M. Nixon administration as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Science and Technology. On November 23, 1970, he left the Department of Commerce after 18 months to become Senior Vice President for Research & Engineering in Xerox Corp. From 1974 to 1986, Tribus directed the Center for Advanced Engineering Study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his tenure, the Center published W. Edwards Deming's groundbreaking book, Out of the Crisis. He helped expand the Center's Video Course Program, a precursor of MIT Professional Education. He also helped to increase enrollment in the Center's Advanced Study Program.

Tribus was a leading supporter and interpreter of W. Edwards Deming. He is also known in the 1970s for an insightful book entitled Rational Descriptions, Decisions and Designs, which popularized Bayesian methods with examples. In the 1960s, Tribus coined the term "thermoeconomics".

In 1961, he was named dean of Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College, where he led the faculty in developing a new curriculum based on engineering design and entrepreneurship. He believed that hands-on engineering design was essential at all levels of the curriculum, saying, "Knowledge without know-how is sterile." He remained in the role until 1969.

He joined General Electric in 1949 and became a gas turbine design engineer, but was unhappy in industry. He returned to academia, joining the faculty of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer. He was a visiting assistant professor of chemical engineering and director of icing research at the University of Michigan between 1952 and 1954. While at UCLA, he hosted Threshold, an hour long television program dealing with science and its impact on society. It aired on CBS in 1958.

Myron T. Tribus (October 30, 1921 – August 31, 2016) was an American organizational theorist, who was the director of the Center for Advanced Engineering Study at MIT from 1974 to 1986. He was known as leading supporter and interpreter of W. Edwards Deming, for popularizing the Bayesian methods, and for coining the term "thermoeconomics".

Myron T. Tribus was born in San Francisco, California, on October 30, 1921 to Edward Lefkowitz and Marie Kramer. His father died in World War I and his mother, a short-hand typist, remarried to Julius Tribus. He graduated in 1942 from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry, and received his Ph.D in engineering in 1949 from the University of California, Los Angeles.